"love is a leash" (that pulls both ways) is a motif introduced in the context of romantic love (annamabel) or marriage (king and luna) but of course it really applies to familial love; the tension between care and obligation is introduced from the start with anna's profession. her title is "companion" or "carer." very early on she expresses that her job is "like being a cross between an infant and a senior citizen. Your life isn’t really something that belongs to you." she juxtaposes the "natural" position of helplessness and dependence on the care of others (under capitalism--the luck of what family you find yourself in) with her own, where age and ability dictate she should be autonomous but she isn't by profession.
a couple episodes later she expresses frustration with mabel (that she herself acknowledges is unfair) -- that anna is stuck with the sole responsibility for the mess of sally's decline and death. she blames mabel for the fact that sally is dying alone and anna has to watch her die--indirectly, for the fact that anna herself is alone. again anna is naturalizing the familial bond, the idea that the adult child is responsible for the declining parent as a sort of repayment for being raised by them.
i think most listeners' reaction to anna's early narration, with the hindsight of knowing mabel is trapped and suffering and sally was severely abusive through her entire childhood, is frustration nearing revulsion towards anna; anna is painfully naive. but it's also twofold: not just why isn't mabel here, why is poor sally stuck with an artificial caretaker (paid) instead of a natural one (filial); but also: why am i here? why is it me who is here and has no life outside of this dying woman?
the answer is obviously: anna is paid, this is her job, with the corollary being: this is her choice. anna herself insists over and over that she likes her job, she chose to do this. it's hard for anna to challenge her hegemonic ideal of family, but i think in a similar way it's easy for the audience to see mabel as the sole victim of this ideal. due to the child abuse. which is fair! but it also unconsciously naturalizes anna's "choice". the nuclear family in its ideal form belongs to the bourgeoisie. as kollontai points out, the bourgeois woman's joining of the workforce in the mid 19th century (the birth of the feminist movement) comes far after the working woman's. the bourgeois woman, driven to seek economic independence, identifies the family as entrapment. domestic labor then gets outsourced to proletariat women (already forced to leave the home), who are acknowledged and paid for it, which bourgeois feminism labels as a mutual win. it's easy to see here how choice here is negligible.
Anyways in this case sally repeatedly collapses the boundary between employee and family, putting anna up in her daughter's bedroom. and then she leaves the house to anna, legally and financially binding her in the position of family.
I leave you my house because you are the only person I know who understands how to care for a thing. That has been your job with me, and it will be your job a little while longer.
anna "understands how to care" because it was her job. sally deliberately unifies these; she understands it as a surer and more reliable form of obligation than blood. anna describes what sally's done to her as indenture.
+ i know this isn't canonical bc based off of what we're given, thomas was just lost and seeking directions, but i don't think it's a stretch to imagine a class divide between him and the martins--hence his total exclusion from mabel's life. his function for the martins is essentially to produce an heir, and then he's discarded. thinking about this + the idea of changelings from fairy stories + anna's uncle disappearing and the $300 payment.
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